UN Human Rights Council Mourns Deaths in ‘Palestinian Territory and Elsewhere’

The United Nations Human Rights Council held a moment of silence on Monday to mourn the “loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere,” without mentioning Hamas’s terror attack against innocent Israelis.

On Monday afternoon, the @UN Human Rights Council observed a moment of silence for the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere.#HRC54 pic.twitter.com/9cgQDoQAyF

— United Nations Human Rights Council | #HRC54 (@UN_HRC) October 9, 2023

The Human Rights Council (or UNHRC) includes such human rights paragons as China, Cuba, and Qatar, among other tyrannical regimes.

The Times of Israel noted:

Pakistani envoy Zaman Mehdi call[ed] the motion on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation member states, representing 57 countries.

Mehdi’s statement blames Israel for the attack and “breeding violence,” without mentioning Israel by name at any point. The statement makes no mention of Israeli victims, terror or Hamas.

…

The UNHRC in Geneva and UN General Assembly have long had a lopsided focus on the Jewish state, targeting Israel in more condemnations and investigations than any other country.

As Breitbart News has noted, President Joe Biden chose to rejoin the Human Rights Council after President Donald Trump withdrew from it because of its anti-Israel bias and its failure to hold actual abusers of human rights accountable for their actions.

Breitbart News reported last year:

The UNHRC was formed after its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights, was discredited as a club of dictators. President George W. Bush chose not to join, after the new UNHRC looked to be plagued by many of the same problems.

Newly-elected President Barack Obama sought to bring the U.S. into the UNHRC in 2009, eagerly reporting on America’s own supposed human rights abuses, such as efforts by states like Arizona to enforce federal immigration laws on the border.

But Obama could not reform the council, either, and it remained a forum for tyrannical regimes to sanitize their own human rights abuses while singling out Israel for condemnation when it attempted to defend itself from radical Islamic terrorism.
In 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the UNHRC, after warning it for years that its obsessive focus on condemning Israel, and its tolerance for human rights abuses by members such as Russia and China, had discredited the council completely.

Trump eventually withdrew the U.S. from the UNHRC, concluding that it could not be reformed. Trump’s critics in the Democratic Party and the mainstream media complained, and Biden sought to rejoin as soon as he took office in 2021.

The Biden State Department argued: “[O]ur withdrawal in June 2018 did nothing to encourage meaningful change, but instead created a vacuum of U.S. leadership,” vowing to use “the full weight of our diplomatic leadership” to reform it.

That effort would appear to have failed, judging from the refusal of the Human Rights Council to condemn Palestinian terrorism even when directed against innocent Israelis on such a massive scale, and when shown to the entire world on social media.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.